


Older Than Magic Itself

by vox_vocis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Immortals, M/M, Soulmates, a fun au i got from tumblr, there's a knife, which makes it awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 18:25:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15321555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vox_vocis/pseuds/vox_vocis
Summary: The ancient and most noble house of Black has been alive for centuries. Every time a member of the family meets their soulmate, which would cause them to begin ageing at the age of seventeen, they kill them. Every time a new soulmate is born, they kill them too. They bring other hopeful immortals who don't mind living without a soulmate into the family in order to continue the bloodline.Sirius knows he has to kill his soulmate. But he just can't bring himself to do it.





	Older Than Magic Itself

Maybe Sirius really was the disappointment his mother thought he was, because he couldn’t even kill his very first soulmate. To be fair, though, Remus was incredible. He was sweet, he was cute, he was just as angry at the world as Sirius was, and he made everything just a little bit brighter. He also made Sirius finally grow into his ears in the years since he’d turned seventeen. There had been that suspicion that Remus would be it for Sirius from the very first day they met, but he’d pushed it to the side. They were eleven, and they were kids, and Sirius was optimistic. They could be friends. Good friends. Best friends. Nothing else.

But Remus was more magic than anything at Hogwarts, and Sirius was done for.

The night was frigid when he went to visit Remus’s new apartment, a light rain falling in a shimmering curtain around Sirius’s umbrella. He shivered a bit, though his coat protected him well enough from the cold. No, the cold came from deep inside his chest, though the knife in his pocket didn’t help. A wand left too many traces, his mother always told him. A knife was unexpected. What powerful wizard would use a knife to kill? The Black family had survived for centuries on surprise, and he would survive right along with them.

Sirius stopped on the doorstep and closed his umbrella. He held it carefully so it wouldn’t disturb the plants on Remus’s stoop - sage, tarragon, thyme, even some vanilla that Sirius knew he spelled to grow outside of its normal climate. He couldn’t help a small smile as he remembered Remus proudly explaining the spellwork to him, his chest puffed out like a bookwormish peacock. 

Three knocks on the door, and then there was Remus, smiling his lopsided smile, his eyes alight behind crooked glasses. Without sparing the moment to think it through, Sirius reached out to straighten them. Remus sighed in that exasperated way of his, the way that said he knew Sirius didn’t give a shit about orderliness and was only trying to get a rise out of him.

“Fancy coming in before I let you catch your death out there?” Remus asked, and Sirius stepped inside.

“As if you would ever let that happen.”

The joke hurt more than Sirius expected it to, hard inside his chest. He unbuttoned his coat, the leather worn between his fingers, but didn’t take it off. Instead, he reached out and took Remus by the arm, drawing him close. Remus gasped, just barely, and Sirius felt the breath of it in his space.

“Siri…” The name faded on Remus’s tongue, the need for language lost to the air and the night and the tension. One of his hands drifted up the the back of Sirius’s neck, his fingers catching loosely in the wispy curls that Sirius hadn’t quite managed to capture in his ponytail.

This kind of sharing space, this closeness, it hadn’t been theirs until just after graduation, when the need for it became too much for Sirius to bear. It had buckled his knees and stolen his breath, magnified every one of Remus’s smiles or tears or derisive head-shakes by the thousands. And then Remus kissed him - kissed him first, with that same exasperation, as if he’d been expecting it centuries earlier and Sirius had only just put it together - and life snapped back into color. It was as if Sirius’s heart had stopped beating ages ago, and only when they kissed did it start again. Which, in a way, it had, and it did.

Sirius’s chin tilted, just a bit, and he let it go the rest of the way, let their lips meet. Remus tasted of strong tea, the kind he drank in the week leading up to the moon to settle his nerves. Sirius wanted to suck the flavor from his lips until none of it remained.

Instead, the hand not holding Remus ducked into the inner pocket of his coat, closed around the hilt of his mother’s knife. His knife. A seventeenth birthday present. He drew the knife from his pocket, his grip lax, easy. He’d practiced on dummies, repaired and ready for another round by the wave of a wand. Between the second and third ribs on the left side. In hard, left for a few seconds, then back out. Wipe for prints, then out the door. Seconds to end years. 

“Remus,” Sirius whispered, pulling back just enough to get a visual on Remus’s chest. He was wearing a sweater stitched from a greyish-lavender yarn, soft and understated and absolutely perfect for him. A single white stripe provided variation near the top of his torso, right where blade would bite skin.

“Would you like a cuppa?” Remus asked, lips swollen and eyes kiss-dazed. “I just put on a new pot.”

“No,” Sirius said, and in spite of everything his mother had told him, in spite of everything he had practiced, his voice broke on the word.

“Sirius?” Remus’s eyes flickered over him for any signs of wrongness, down his body and back to his face and back down, widening at the sign of the knife. “Sirius.”

“The Black family has been alive for centuries.” Sudden, salty tears blurred Sirius’s vision as he took a step back from Remus. His knife twirled in his fingers, but whether it was to intimidate or to simply release the anxiety that pounded through him, he didn’t know. “We survived the magic purges of the medievals and the Christian Reformation. We are magic and we are power and we laugh in the face of Death himself. We are older than the pyramids. We are older than magic itself. We are the ancient and most noble house of Black.

“I don’t want to kill you.” That last sentence escaped Sirius’s lips as he held up the knife, tightened his grip on it, poised himself to stab.

And then Remus spoke. “So don’t.”

He was so calm about the whole thing. Maybe that was why Sirius dropped the knife. Because Remus was staring right at him, ready to strike him dead, and there was still the slightest curl of a smile on his face. Because his head shook in the same way it did when he and James and Peter were preparing a prank back at school. Because he didn’t scream, and he didn’t flee, and he didn’t fight. He just stood there, watching Sirius with a knowing that felt like it went back farther than any family line. It went straight back to their souls, to the very base of their personhood. It went back to them, always back to them.

The knife clattered to the floor, but Sirius didn’t care, because he was already button his coat. “We’ll need to move,” he said, stepping further into Remus’s sitting room. “We can Apparate, that’s no problem, but we’ll need somewhere to go. Somewhere no one can find us. Once we’re sure no one’s following us, we can send word to the others- Bollocks. James and Lily will need a new Secret Keeper. If I’m killed-”

“Peter can do it,” Remus supplied immediately. He moved past Sirius and into the bedroom, emerging seconds later with a suitcase. “I keep it for emergencies. Which we have right now, apparently.”

“Bloody brilliant.” Sirius drew him in for a kiss, a deep one, then drew his wand. “Where to? France? Italy? Albania?”

Remus laughed a bit, his free hand resting lightly on Sirius’s chest. “Greece.”

“America.”

“Peru.”

“China.”

“Ethiopia.”

“Antarctica.”

“Are you mental?” Remus wrinkled his nose. “It’s bloody freezing there.”

“Wherever we are,” Sirius said, “We’ll be together.”

He flicked his wand, and with a crack, they were gone, leaving only a threadbare apartment, a knife in the mudroom, and a whistling kettle of tea on the stove.


End file.
